Origin of the Love of the Species

[Last night, I had a dream.  In this dream, I was explaining to someone where I got my love of animals.  I can’t remember exactly who I was explaining it to—I think maybe I had become famous for something or other and I was being interviewed.  In any event, this was one of those dreams that I had no recollection of upon waking (crowded out by other dreams, I think), but came to me nearly complete about half an hour later.  And it struck me (somewhat forcefully) that, had I been asked the question while I was awake, some of the things I said in the dream would have never occurred to me.  But sometimes dreams are good for that: remembering things you thought you’d forgotten, or even realizing things you never actually knew.  So I threw off my original plans for this week’s post, and I’m giving you this post instead, which combines both the answer I would give while conscious and, apparently, the answer I would give while asleep.]

My love of animals has always been a defining part of me, as long as I can remember.  In fact, I have a very clear memory of one Christmas, when I was very young—this may actually be my earliest childhood memory that isn’t a false one¹—when I had asked for a Noah’s Ark for Christmas and both sets of grandparents got me one.  The memory is of me on the landing of my grandparents’ house (on my mother’s side), which was halfway down the stairs (unlike in most houses, these stairs were more like the stairs in an apartment building or office building: you walked halfway down the stairs to the landing, then made a U-turn and walked the rest of the way down).  My mother was holding me in her arms, waiting for the rest of the adults below to give us the go-ahead that everything was prepared just so, and everyone was ready with their cameras and whatnot, and she was whispering in my ear that I shouldn’t be disappointed for getting the same gift twice and that I needed to act surprised and pleased.  In many ways, this sums up a pretty big chunk of my childhood: my mother, very preoccupied with other people’s opinions and desperate never to disappoint anyone, advising me how to think or react or feel.  The funny thing is, she needn’t have bothered.  I think my grandparents, at least on one side, were thrilled with my request for a Noah’s Ark, because they assumed it was a sign that I was properly absorbing my religious indoctrination.  The truth was, I was just in it for the animals—the boats were no different than a cardboard box or a zip-loc bag as far as I was concerned, and the human figures (if there even were any) were promptly lost.  All I cared about were the animals, and, you see, in two sets of of Noah’s Arks, there are twice as many animals, and many of them are different.  I didn’t have to fake anything.

My grandfather’s house, as it happens, is the very thing that I recently recalled as probably being instrumental to my love of animals, even though I never really realized it before.  My mother’s father, like 3 out of my 4 grandparents, grew up on a farm.  He knew a lot about nature: he was an amateur botanist, grew tomatoes professionally for a while, and knew how to skin a rabbit, as I discovered once in a rather horrifying manner which probably scarred me for life.  But he was also the only one of my grandparents to attend college, and ended up making the most money.  My grandparents on that side were what I like to call “small town rich:” in New York or Chicago, they might have been considered moderately well-off, but in the small town where I grew up (and where I was born, and where both my parents were born, and where this very grandfather attended high school, becoming a member of the very first graduating class of the same high school from which both my parents and I later graduated), in this small town, as I say, they were considered rich.  I think the story is that my grandfather made some money with his contracting business and ended up buying a huge tract of land that would later be developed into one of the two swanky neighborhoods in my town, and then made even more money selling off most of it for other rich people to build their houses on.  But he kept about an acre and a half, and that was where he built his house.  It wasn’t a mansion (small town rich, remember?), but it was a big, two-story house that was built into a side of a hill, so that from the front it looked like a one-story house, and then when you walked out the back door, you were on a balcony that ran the length of the house, looking out on his “yard” ... and that’s where the magic really was.

Because an acre and a half probably doesn’t sound like much compared to some of the compounds of the ultra-wealthy we might see on television, but let me assure you: an acre and a half is enormous to a five-year-old, a seven-year-old ... even a ten-year-old.  By the time I was in high school (perhaps even middle school—my memory for dates grows hazy with age, as it does for us all), they had sold the place and moved to Florida, as grandparents are wont to do, but a lot of my very formative years were spent there, wandering the grounds of this magical place.  Being the amateur botanist and later tomato farmer, for my grandfather this was mostly about his prize azaleas, which he cloned and grafted like some mad plant scientist; I even remember accompanying him on trips into the Appalachian mountains, looking for wild azaleas to infuse his creations with new genetic stock.  So there were a lot of azaleas, but also rhododendrons and flowering dogwoods and many other plants that I can’t remember and probably never even learned; there were gravel-paved walkways through flowers with riotous colors, and long greenhouses full of experiments (and, later, tomatoes).  But all that was window dressing, because for me it was all about the animals.

To the left of the house was a small pond where I used to catch tadpoles.  Since the whole place was built into a hill, that pond turned into a one-story waterfall that filled a much bigger pond.  (And, though I didn’t understand it till much later, there was a pump at the bottom of the big pond that constantly shunted water back up the little pond to keep the system going.)  In this pond were bullfrogs of truly impressive size: my mother said that my grandfather used to go “gigging” in his pond when she was younger, to catch frogs so he could enjoy frog legs for dinner.  There were of course various birds that were attracted to this waterscape: wading birds and the occasional duck or goose flying by during a migration.  The water flowed down articial canals that paralleled the flower-lined walkways and fed other ponds in other places.  There were water lillies and any number of water-loving insects: water striders and boatmen and dragonflies.  There were fish in the ponds too, of course: ornamental koi in the main pond at the bottom of the waterfall, and other, mostly smaller, fish throughout the system.  Rabbits lived there, as did moles, both of which my grandfather murdered happily (they were considered pests).  There were multitudes of squirrels, which my grandmother fed stale cheese crackers to in a large “bird” feeder attached to the balcony.  The kitchen had a sliding glass door, so you could sit at the kitchen table and watch the birds and the squirrels fighting over the bird seed and the sunflower seeds and the old crackers.  The squirrels were the most entertaining, of course, but you could also see cardinals and blue jays and robins, which their distinctive orange breasts, and occasionally chickadees or finches.  There were foxes and raccoons too, though I mostly knew of those from stories my mother told; I can’t recall ever seeing any personally, though I was always on the lookout.  At night you might see a possum, though, which are kind of scary in a way you don’t really realize until you meet one in person.  Also at night, the sound of the bullfrogs was nearly overwhelming, backed up by the crickets ... so many orthopterans: field crickets, grasshoppers, kaytdids.  In fact, it was trivial to catch field crickets, which we often did, and my grandparents even had a gold colored cage that sat on the hearth where we often put a cricket so you could listen to it indoors as well (but also let it go again when the sound inevitably became annoying).  There were chipmunks sometimes, and once or twice a larger rodent which might have been a muskrat or woodchuck.  I remember discovering rolie-polies, which my mother always called “sow bugs” for some reason,² and also digging for earthworms.  I’m pretty sure there were lizards, and of course my grandfather had a few turtles in the ponds, and there were probably a few snakes here and there, though I can’t recall for sure.  Lots of spiders too, and the occasional tick, which I learned at a fairly young age how to detach and kill (with a match, in an ashtray, till they popped).  Ticks and mosquitoes were about the only things I ever killed though: as far as I was concerned, if it was trying to suck your blood, it was fair game, but otherwise live and let live.  I was mostly horrified at my grandfather’s tendency to kill things he found annoying, and I already mentioned how disturbing it was to go into one of the many tool sheds attached to the greenhouses one day and find an inside-out rabbit, which my grandather was apparently curing, stretched out up on a high wall.  And don’t even get me started on the complicated mole traps, with their trip wires and cruel spikes.  But, for the most part, every trip in my grandfather’s “back yard” was a wildlife safari for me, and I have the fondest memories of those times.

I always asked for animal-related things.  I got a set of wildlife encycolpedias and read them nearly cover to cover, which is why I know a lot of the scientific classifications of things, like how spiders are arachnids not insects, but both arachnids and insects are arthropods, as are crustaceans, which rolie-polies are (the only land-dwelling crustaceans, in fact), and that ferrets and weasels are not rodents but rather mustelids, which are carnivores, similar to felines and ursines, and that the rodent-looking hyrax is most closely related to the elephant, and that a hyena is not a canine regardless of the fact it really looks like one, and that anemones are coelenterates (like coral) while sea liliies are echinoderms (like starfish) even though they both look like plants, and that earthworms are actually annelids (like leeches) while “true” worms are divided into flatworms, roundworms, and ribbon worms, and a bunch of other useless zoological trivia.  Of course, those encyclopedias are now nearly 50 years old, which is why I still get surprised sometimes when zoologists have changed their minds since then and I find out that skunks aren’t mustelids any more and rabbits aren’t rodents any more and the coelenterates have been broken up into the cnidarians and the ctenophorans (because a comb jelly isn’t really a jellyfish, apparently) and birds and reptiles are all the same thing now (goes along with dinosaurs having feathers).  Not to mention that I can still be surprised by the occasional nature documentary, or (in particular) watching Octonauts with my youngest child, when they talk about animals that hadn’t been properly classified or even discovered at all when my primary reference materials were written, such as the vampire squid or the blobfish.  Of course, I didn’t rely solely on a single source, and, after seeing some commercial on late afternoon television, I talked my grandmother on the other side into subscribing to a set of “animal cards,” which would come 10 or 20 or so to a pack, every month, and then whenever I’d go to that grandparents’ house I’d eagerly open all the packs that had come since I was last there and see all the new animals, and then I’d carefully put them in order in my handy plastic container: not in alphabetical order, of course, but in order by Linnaean taxonomy, making my own choices for the evolutionary order of the phyla, based mainly on my devouring of the aforementioned encyclopedias.  They didn’t always agree, and that irked me,³ but I kept on collecting them, until I needed to convince my grandmother to order a second container for the cards, and eventually she figured out that they were never going to stop sending her packs of cards (for a small monthly charge, of course) and she cancelled them.  Somehow I managed to retain the encyclopedias, although they’re much the worse for wear at this point, but those cards are long lost.

So, you see, I was really into animals as a kid.  That also extended to the media I consumed and my make-believe a lot of the time:⁴ I was really into Tarzan, and The Jungle Book, and Dr. Dolittle.  Of course, now I know enough to recognize that there’s a lot of problematic material in these stories, but not only was I too young to get that as a kid, I was also just glossing over the parts where the people were interacting.  I only cared about the animals.  If Tarzan was making friends with elephants, or Mowgli was being taught by a panther, or Dr. Dolittle was talking to flying fish, then I was paying attention.  The insensitive portrayals of indigenous people didn’t register for me: not because they were indigenous, but because they were people.  Unless you were an animal, or at the very least a human who could communicate on some level with an animal, I wasn’t too interested.  I also had a bunch of books from the perspective of animals: I particularly recall a set of books consisting of, I think, Black Beauty, Bambi, one of the Lassie books, a book about a raccoon, and perhaps one or two others ... Gentle Ben? Misty of Chincoteague?  I read them all so long ago I can barely remember any of the details ... I do have a memory of Lassie’s owner hiring a stranger to feed her some meat which made her mildly ill so that she would learn to never accept food from strangers, a trick which I found both cruel and clever.  But there were many more books to come, and movies (The Secret of Nimh and the wizard battle from The Sword in the Stone) and television (Cricket on the Hearth and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi) and even continuing into adolescence, when I discovered more sophisticated stories such as Watership Down.  I was also into any stories of people who could transform into animals, from Manimal to Maya from Space: 1999, which led to my predilection for playing druids in D&D.

And that doesn’t even begin to get into my pets: as a child, I had dogs, parrakeets, hamsters, fish, and turtles; as an adult I expanded into cats, ferrets, guinea pigs, and ball pythons.  I’ve also lived with iguanas, leopard geckos, rats, frogs, and bearded dragons, and suffered through my grandmother’s chicken coop and my mother’s attempts to keep rabbits and even squirrels.  I used to pet-sit for a tortoise, and I once had a good friend who was a beekeeper (and I only ever got stung once—valuable lesson: don’t stand directly in front of the hive, because that’s like standing in the middle of a busy bee highway).  Today we’re down to 2 dogs, 3 cats, and a relatively teeming tank of tropical fish, shrimp, snails, and one seemingly immortal dwarf African frog, but there’s constant talk of another bearded dragon, so who knows what the future will bring.

If you clicked on the link in the paragraph above, you read some of my thoughts on animals and how they’re people too.  Human beings who have the attitude that someone is “just an animal” and therefore not deserving of love or kindness due to having too much body hair or lack of opposable thumbs really irk me, and I’m sorry if you happen to be such a one.  For me, I’ve spent my whole life reading about, talking to, and interacting with animals, and not just the cute and cuddly ones.  All of them.  Sure, many of them are pretty dumb: a firefly, for instance, is never going engage with you on an intellectual level.  But, on the other hand, when you let that little guy crawl over your hand in the fading summer twillight, and he suddenly glows that greenish-yellow glow ... if that doesn’t touch you on a spiritual level, you are definitely doing something wrong in your life.  And that’s a friggin’ bug, man: the joy and affection you can receive from spending time with a ferret, the amiable call and response you can have with a guinea pig, if you learn to emulate its whistle, the comfort you can derive from having a ball python snuggled around your shoulders—these things cannot be replicated by humans.  Animals are not better than humans, of course, just different, and, if you think they are somehow lesser than, perhaps you’re not paying close enough attention.  Or perhaps you just missed out on a childhood spent in a huge back yard, learning about the diversity of life.

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1 And then again it might also be a false memory: childhood memories are slippery.

2 They have many, many names, as it happens: pillbugs, woodlice, doodle bugs, etc etc.

3 I’ve talked a bit about my OCD-adjacent obsession with lists of animals (and other things) in part I of my D&D and Me series.

4 And I talked about this in D&D and Me part 4.